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Ask HN: It's 2023, how do you choose between MySQL and Postgres?

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Re: Ask HN: It's 2023, how do you choose between MySQL and Postgres?

#41

Post by TehShrike »

adoxyz wrote: post #17

Choose whichever one you/your team is more familiar with. Both are battle-tested and proven and will likely scale to whatever needs you have.

This is the correct answer.

Whichever one you start out with, you will be annoyed if you switch to the other one 5 years later. I started out with mysql, and when I started working on a postgres project, I was shocked at some of the ways it was lacking (how am I supposed to store email addresses in a database without collations?).

But when postgres folks grouse about stuff in mysql, I'm usually nodding along and saying "yeah, that would be nice".

They're both great options. If anybody on your team is already an expert at one of them, use that one.

Re: Ask HN: It's 2023, how do you choose between MySQL and Postgres?

#42

Post by nicoburns »

gardenhedge wrote: post #10

If Postgres was that much better than MySQL then you would expect to see exact reasons on why to pick it. Every comment so far has not listed any reason.

A few reasons:

- Transactional DDL statements (schema modifications)

- Better support for UPSERT operations

- Better JSON support (including ability to index into JSON columns)

- the RETURNING statement to return data that was inserted/updated

In general Postgres is a lot more featureful than MySQL.

Re: Ask HN: It's 2023, how do you choose between MySQL and Postgres?

#43

Post by euroderf »

mort96 wrote: post #19
MrThoughtful wrote: post #12

By choosing SQLite. No server process and a single file per DB which I can put wherever I like.

I like SQLite. But I really wish its default behavior wasn't to simply allow garbage data into the database. If I have an int column, don't let me accidentally store a string.

create table strict

Re: Ask HN: It's 2023, how do you choose between MySQL and Postgres?

#44

Post by MrResearcher »

Postgres doesn't have type hints and it might create a false impression of robustness until it messes up table statistics and does FULL SCAN against a table with millions of rows ignoring all indicies. It happens super rarely though, so if you run anything critical, you'll probably be down only for a few hours once a year or two. Be ready for this to happen though.

Apart from that (and noticeably higher memory consumption), Postgres is most likely preferable.

Re: Ask HN: It's 2023, how do you choose between MySQL and Postgres?

#48

Post by chunk_waffle »

maxmorlocke wrote: post #18
chunk_waffle wrote: post #3

I dunno if this is still true but a couple of years ago MySQL was cheaper on AWS (RDS/Aurora) than Postgres.

For a typical db.t3.xlarge instance, you're talking about 29c/hour vs 27.2c per hour. That's $157.68 as the total difference for one year's runtime, when the whole instance cost for postgres would be $2540.4 for the year, or about 6%. The larger the machine, the closer to parity. Given the absolutely small difference, I hope this isn't the dividing line in any commercial project.

Again, I don't still know if this is the case, but you could use smaller instances with MySQL aurora than with Postgres, given the way our application worked it would have made a big difference for us if we had used mysql.

RDS/Aurora was our most expensive resource so we were looking at ways to cut that cost down and mysql was one option (though the way the app worked and the extensions that it relied on made it not a possibility.)

Re: Ask HN: It's 2023, how do you choose between MySQL and Postgres?

#49

Post by noodlesUK »

dijit wrote: post #36

There is almost no good reason to choose MySQL over PostgreSQL for any operational reason, I did a deep dive many moons ago (before major improvements in performance to postgres) and people were saying that MySQL was faster. I found that not to be true and the differences have only gained even more favour towards postgres. also, I assume you mean MariaDB as MySQL is owned by Oracle and I would greatly implore anyone…

I think that the only reasons to choose MySQL (or Maria) over Postgres for a new project are operational. Postgres is probably the better database in almost all respects, but major version upgrades are much much more of a pain on Postgres than on almost any other system I have ever used. That being said, I would choose Postgres pretty much every time for a new project. The only reason I would use Maria or MySQL would be if I thought I later would want to have something like Vitess, for which I think there isn't really an equivalent for Postgres.

Re: Ask HN: It's 2023, how do you choose between MySQL and Postgres?

#50

Post by mort96 »

eesmith wrote: post #35
mort96 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like SQLite. But I really wish its default behavior wasn't to simply allow garbage data into the database. If I have an int column, don't let me accidentally store a string.

https://www.sqlite.org/stricttables.html "In a CREATE TABLE statement, if the "STRICT" table-option keyword is added to the end, after the closing ")", then strict typing rules apply to that table. ... The STRICT keyword at the end of a CREATE TABLE statement is only recognized by SQLite version 3.37.0 (2021-11-27) and later. sqlite> create table x (a int); sqlite> insert into x values ('hello'); sqlite> select * fro…

Yeah, I know about that, and I'm doing that on all my tables these days. It's just sad that the default behaviour is to allow garbage data, and that if you ever forget to put 'strict' on your tables you'll have a perfectly functional application with no sign that anything is wrong until you suddenly find corrupt data in your database.
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